One of which I’ll be giving closer scrutiny, one of which I will view at a distance.

• Distance first: C Spike Trotman’s latest comic features MK Reed partnering up on words,pictures from Clive Hawken, colors from Maarta Laiho, and letters from Ed Dukeshire. It’s called Delver, it’s a five-issue limited series, and it’s a dungeon crawl story filled with the sorts of societal implications thinking that Spike’s known for, and the YA perspective that Reed’s known for:
  

  Delver is my answer to ‘Where are all these abandoned, treasure-laden dungeons coming from, anyway? And what happens when you unload all that loot in the tiny hamlet down the road?’

  Not a lot of dungeon crawls start out with the major threat being gentrification and that is a perspective that I just realized I have been sorely lacking in my genre fiction.

  It’s also on comiXology, which means I find myself of multiple minds about it. It’s all over their service, and various Amazon channels like Kindle. I don’t get comics that way, because I refuse to “buy” media that I do not in turn own.

  When it’s all done, it’ll be available on Amazon print-on-demand, which is fine in that I can get a physical thing that can’t be yanked back, but I’d have to see what the price point for the trade is versus per issue costs. Even then, I’m a big fan of my local comic shop, and getting stories from a de facto monopoly¹ that is bypassing them entirely? I’m deeply ambivalent.

  But dang if that description isn’t right up my alley:

  Temerity, our main character, is a teen girl stuck in the middle of sudden economic upheaval in her very small town, except that her town’s gold rush also involves giant monsters springing out of the ground. She has no idea how to help her family and neighbors with the man-made crisis above ground, and the adults around her aren’t any better at solving problems.

  Delver issue #1 releases today on comiXology, US$2.99, or free if you comiXology Unlimited, Kindle Unlimited, or Prime Reading.

• Closer scrutiny: one of the great things about webcomics is there’s always somebody doing work that is going to interest you that you just learned about. Today, for me, that would be IO Black, and I have absolutely no idea what their webcomic is about or if it’s any good. The work that I’m digging into is a survey on how you get readers, and it’s at the juicy intersection of there was a lot of thought put into this and enough responses to achieve statistical significance:
  

  (Thread) I recently ran a Twitter poll to see how people were finding new webcomics. Thanks to signal boosts, we got nearly 3,000 votes – and the results couldn’t be clearer:

  WORD OF MOUTH – 2118 (70.7%)
  COMICS PORTALS – 523 (17.5%)
  ONLINE ADS – 216 (7.2%)
  OTHER – 139 (4.6%)

  (If you’re wondering, these numbers include “Other” votes that were reassigned to their “proper” category based on the exact voter response. In the interests of transparency, you can find all of that raw data here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OG…)

  OH YEAH, THAT’S THE STUFF. I know that sounds sarcastic as hell, but I genuinely love this kind of data.

  Black goes on in that thread to talk about general lessons to take away, with a deeper dig into the specific topic of discoverability via #hastags. There’s a second thread about what makes for a good #hashtag, and the beginnings of trying to devise one that makes sense for the kind of community interactions that will give visibility and prompt others to pay attention to your work and talk about it.

  My advice? Do what I’m going to be doing in free time for the next couple of days: dig into the poll data, and keep an eye on what Black’s saying. Right now, their twitterfeed is going to be the centerpoint of this discussion.

Spam of the day:

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I’m not sure if you’re asking if I was singing, or if I got singed by something hot, but I don’t believe I’ll click on your link, which appears to send a further spam mail to about 11 different addresses in the UK.

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¹ One that I try to have as little to do with as possible, given that every thing they sell at cheaper prices is based on the immiseration of their workers and predicated on the harvesting of data from me for sale elsewhere. Oh, and with the added benefit of undercutting and destroying a wide range of merchants who can’t compete if only because they are hobbled by old-fashioned things like a workforce that gets bathroom breaks and minimum wage. It has been, relatively speaking, easy for me to avoid doing business with Wal-Mart over how they treat their employees; it’s damn near impossible to keep track of what’s Amazon and what isn’t.